Pray You Die Alone: Horror Stories

by Andersen Prunty

  Memories trickled through her head and, for the first time in a long time, she thought of the Infinity Room.

  Anna had discovered it the summer she was twelve and had immediately told Carmen about it. Carmen had dubbed it the Infinity Room without any real reason, they just decided they liked the name. Furthermore, it was a name they could agree on. The small, one room house in the middle of the woods became like a slice of adulthood for them. They went there and talked about whatever they wanted to as loudly as they wanted to. Sometimes Carmen stole cigarettes from her mother and, together, they smoked them in the Infinity Room. They got drunk their first time in the Infinity Room. Anna lost her virginity there when she was fourteen. It was with one of Carmen’s cousins who had come down for the week. He was seventeen and told her he had already initiated Carmen. It lasted only a couple of minutes and ended with the boy awkwardly masturbating in her face. She didn’t learn until later that was how they did it in pornos.

  She cared nothing for the boy and nothing for the experience although, over the next couple of years, she took a few more boys to the Infinity Room. When she was sixteen, she realized she only liked boys as friends. Carmen was who Anna was attracted to. Other women would come later but, at the time, she thought only of Carmen. That summer, the Infinity Room blossomed into something very much like a house with Carmen and Anna playing the parts of newlyweds. Slowly, as the summer drew on and rotted into fall, a taint came over the Infinity Room. For the first time, there were arguments. The girls said things to each other they didn’t really mean. Things were done that shouldn’t be done. The winter and early spring were unbearable, a screaming black Rorschach blot of heartbroken teenage depression. It was here Anna’s memory broke up and turned to static.

  “Carmen,” Anna said, barely audible. It felt good. It was a name that started all the way at the back of the throat, brought the lips together and exited the mouth with a soft air, the tongue left to caress the roof of the mouth.

  “Carmen.”

  Her car left by the dirt access road, Anna approached the small house in the early moonlight, her heart leaping around in her chest. Choked with memories, she pulled open the door and stepped into the familiar smell of old rotting wood and all the familiarity of the past.

  With an electric rush, it came over her. Veins pounding, skin crawling, she remembered what had happened on that April day just after turning seventeen.

  It had been a rough morning. Anna had fought with Carmen the previous night and it looked like they might finally go their separate ways. Wanting to get away from her mother’s questioning (Are you using drugs, Anna? No boy’s worth all this, Anna.), she went to the Infinity Room.

  She remembered everything now with a distilled clarity.

  The way she had stalked up to the old house, wanting only to sit and sulk in one of its cool corners. Sit and sulk and be alone and think about how she would have to get used to that word: “alone.” She remembered the way she had yanked the rickety old door back on its tenuously moored hinges. The way she had felt when she saw the boy on top of Carmen, working away. The look in Carmen’s eyes that said, with glistening surprise, things could never be the same again.

  Anna felt hackles rise all over her body. A previously unfelt electricity started in her stomach when she saw Carmen’s hips, pale and perfect, below her upraised cotton dress, rising to meet the boy’s thrusts. Unbridled, Anna felt the electricity, the energy, explode from her skin.

  She screamed. Powerful and focused, she directed that energy to the sick revenge taking place on the floor of the Infinity Room. Then it was their turn to scream.

  The poor boy didn’t even know what hit him.

  He had come down somewhere on the state route. The trucker who rolled over him said he never even saw him. It was like he came out of nowhere. The papers, of course, never said he fell from the sky. It was speculated the he had simply wandered out onto the road at the wrong time. There was alcohol in his system, never mind that it wasn’t enough to write his accident off as a drunken mishap. The papers never mentioned Carmen and Anna. The girls were the only ones who knew about that, about Anna’s awful power.

  Carmen, poor Carmen, would never be the same again.

  And Anna turned her back on it all. Left to throw herself into her studies, to busy herself with the creation of a purely intellectual world she could shape and control with all the tools of her trade.

  Now Anna stood in the Infinity Room, so much cooler than outside. Outside where there was life—the rattle of cicadas, the chirp of crickets, the ever growing and twisting of the trees and vines. In here there were only memories.

  Anna circled the small iron top of the thickly rusted legless grill, something she and Carmen had dragged here to build fires in. Fires that melted away their inhibitions and their childhood.

  Looking down into it, she saw red-hot coals flicker and ignite into a small flame.

  Anna wasn’t very shocked. She expected things like this to happen when she came back to the Infinity Room.

  Looking around, she noticed not much had changed. There were new things spraypainted and chalked on the walls: OZZY RULES, THE BREW CREW, SENIORS 91, FUCK ME MARYLOU, POOPTOOTH LIVES. All of the scribblings stood out as epithets toward her memories.

  Then she saw Carmen, faintly at first and then drawn into sharp focus. The insubstantial figure walked toward the fire, toward Anna, coming out of nowhere.

  “Carmen,” Anna said.

  “Anna,” Carmen said back.

  “It’s good to see you.”

  “You knew I would be here. I’ve always been here.”

  “Well, I knew you would be here in spirit.”

  “No, you saw to it a long time ago that I would always be here. Why did we call it the Infinity Room? Do you remember?”

  Anna shook her head.

  “We should have called it the Nowhere Room,” Carmen said. “Because that’s what it is. You know, I’ve been right here ever since that day, waiting for you to come back. I knew you would.”

  “You haven’t been here since that day. I watched you walk away…”

  “But I was never the same, Anna.”

  Anna used to like to hear Carmen say her name, but now it contained all the beauty of a racial slur. It was something spit or thrown out of the mouth.

  Carmen continued, “You stole something vital from me that day. Just like how you managed to throw Peter nearly a mile away. You stole something from him, too. And you, you were too self-involved to even realize what had happened. What would your students… what would your precious colleagues think if they knew you could wipe them out with a single thought?”

  “Carmen… I didn’t mean… I was just so mad. I had no control over it. I never... It’s never happened since. I’ve learned.” Anna’s body was trembling.

  “The Nowhere Room, Anna. This is where you left my insides when you scraped them out. But you wouldn’t know. You’ve never come back to visit.”

  Warm tears coursed down Anna’s cool cheeks. “I’m sorry, Carmen… If I had known, I would have…”

  “Would have what? Come back so you could piss on my soul. Take it out of nowhere and put it someplace worse. You say you had no control over it, but what about after that incident? What about when you saw me walking down the halls at school, a hollow shell? What about after I got sick and laid in bed for months? I had strangers coming to visit me, Anna. People I didn’t even know. And where were you? Where were you at my funeral? Another room filled with strangers.”

  “My parents wouldn’t let me go.”

  “You were nowhere.”

  Sobs and sadness rippled the muscles in Anna’s face. She drew in a snotty breath and said, “Carmen, I only wanted to be with you… Since then, you’re the only one I’ve thought about.”

  “Is that what it was all about? Because you couldn’t have me. Because I liked boys better than you?”

  “No,” Anna sobbed.

  “Well, you had me and then
you let me go. I think you could have brought me back from nowhere and I still think you will. I’ve learned some tricks of my own over the years.”

  “To say the least.” Anna thought about the unseen forces that had attacked her over the years, things she had always thought were part of her own mind until earlier today.

  “You’ve noticed,” Carmen said.

  Now Anna’s black memories turned to an even blacker tumor of fear. From inside her head, she felt a sickening twisting metal feel, the one that had driven her to the floor earlier. But this time it pulled her toward the fire. The nausea blossomed like a mushroom cloud and she bent to throw up and found herself unable to fall to her knees, her puke hanging from her chin and sizzling onto the fire, fueling it rather than dampening it. And then she stepped into the small grill, felt the flames at her feet, licking at her jeans and crawling slowly upward until they licked at the backs of her arms, up her stomach, her breasts, her neck, her spine, her hair, her chin, her lips, her cheeks, her eyes.

  And she heard Carmen’s voice saying, “I’m going to get out of nowhere and you’re going to take me. I am the fire around you. I am the Nowhere Room. I am the trees and the snakes and the wolves and the dirt and the air and the stars and the moon. I consume you, Anna. I consume you.”

  Anna felt the fire burning the moisture out of her skin, shrinking it. She felt her skin crack and pop open and heard her vital fluids hissing onto the flames.

  Slowly, skinless, Anna stepped out of the fire. With a new vision, she looked around the Nowhere Room and saw it for what it was: Nowhere. On tender feet, she crossed the warped wooden floor and exited through the door.

  Outside, the balmy night breeze rustled the trees and moved over her moist, raw body. Everything was bright and purple and she felt magic snake through her exposed muscles and veins. Relishing the night, she walked deeper into the woods until she reached a small clearing. Here she smelled the earth’s dark loam and almost thought she could smell each mineral in the soil, hear them slowly dissolve into the trapped rainwater. She felt the dark decay of the dead leaves and felt the slow growth, so full of life, of the trees around her.

  Then she heard the banshee-like yattering of wolves, all of them responding to one another, their collective howls and yelps rising to an ear shattering crescendo.

  They surrounded her.

  “I am all that surrounds you,” she heard Carmen whisper in her head.

  Slowly, they closed their circle on her. These were not the beautiful, powerful wolves she recognized from nature photos. No. These were the Gibraltar version. What wolves looked like in Nowhere. They were thin and mangy, yellow-eyed and decrepit. Wild dogs. They looked so underfed they would eat anything and, eagerly, they sniffed at the meal at hand.

  Anna was not afraid.

  Fear was not an option.

  She felt their wet muzzles on her glistening body. She felt their tongues lapping at her blood, sucking it from between muscle and tendon. Sensing the competition amongst them, they all tore in at once and Anna felt their broken teeth rip into her meat and drag her down into their pack. She felt and smelled their greasy fur rubbing up against her and longed for their filthiness. She felt one of them between her legs, nuzzling at her burnt sex before digging in with its teeth. She felt her meat come off her bones and stared up at that faceless purple sky, glittering with the icily indifferent stars. She felt herself go out into that sky, something inside of her rising above the wolves. She felt herself circling the earth, pulled toward the sun and burning up in the atmosphere, fires exploding behind her eyes and through her viscera and she exploding with them.

  When she came to she was curled up beside a long dead fire in the thickly rusted legless grill of the Nowhere Room. The oily, burnt charcoal smell cloyed at her. Dawn trickled in through the windows.

  She took deep breaths. She ran her hands down her body.

  She was alive.

  She was whole.

  Thank God.

  Slowly, like somebody coming upon a new world, she walked out of the woods and down the dirt access road walled in by those fields of corn.

  She remembered leaving the keys in her car, ready to make a quick escape, and hoped no one had stolen it.

  Heavily, she trudged along in the dirt until she reached her car, the door handle feeling cool, clean, and good.

  Anna sat down and turned the ignition.

  She reached for the power button on the radio, wanting some loud music to wipe away the darkness of the previous night. She still wasn’t sure what had happened. Wasn’t sure she really wanted to know.

  With her fingers on the tuner, another voice, a foreign one, came into her head, “What are we going to listen to, Anna?”

  “Carmen,” she whispered.

  Without controlling them, her fingers pressed the tuner until it landed on a jangly rock song.

  “There, that’s good,” Carmen said.

  Anna pulled away from the gravel roadside feeling both extremely sad and happy. She realized she no longer controlled her body, it was Carmen. From within her own head, she could feel out Carmen’s thoughts and they were not her own. Carmen wanted to see her new house. Carmen wanted to meet her new coworkers, people who had only been faces across a metaphysical void. Carmen wanted to feel a man between her legs, his cock battering her insides. Nausea racked Anna but she had no way of being sick, her body no longer hers. Anna sensed the new duality of her existence, heard the yammering voice of another person’s thoughts, and felt the first powerless fingers of madness.

  “Welcome to the Nowhere Room.” Carmen laughed with Anna’s mouth, checked her soul behind Anna’s eyes in the rearview mirror, and sped down the state route.

  Black Rosita’s Man

  The hills were dark and the hills were mean. But, the rumor went, give Alistair Doos a guitar and things would lighten up a little bit. Judging by the crowd that turned out at the Downtrod Inn, he could make things lighten up a whole lot.

  It was the crowd there on that Saturday night that amazed Nathan East. The music was expectedly astounding, but he had heard most of that from recordings. All the recordings took place in this same location—the Downtrod Inn, Sawmill, Ohio. Nathan looked at the crowd around him. He had hoped to be pressed against the stage but even halfway back in this tiny bar was a great place to be. People were packed in from the stage back to the actual bar and, beyond that, out the front door. If anybody wanted to sit and drink they had to do it out on the porch.

  Looking around, it was easy for Nathan to divide the locals from the people like him—country blues fans whose curiosity finally got the best of them. It surprised him how many of the people there were white and how many of them looked like they should be listening to something a little more hip. When you’re great, Nathan thought, it doesn’t matter what type of music you play, your audience is diverse, to say the least. It was true, Alistair Doos wasn’t one of the first blues musicians. At something like 70 he was too young for that, but he was certainly one of the best, if not the best. Nathan skeptically told himself that probably wasn’t true. He wondered how many great musicians went unrecorded or, in a more hateful time, were completely excluded from the music world.

  The main thing Nathan thought about was that he was here now. He had braved the state routes and the back country roads, gravel or dirt in many cases, to come and stand here in this tiny, white paint-peeling bar and watch a genius at work. Here in one of the poorest regions of Ohio. Here on a mountain, the summer spice fresh outside and the cheap draft beer as fresh as it got on the inside. Here, with people slowly nodding their heads or grinding their hips on every side of him. He was here. He was watching his favorite musician doing his thing on stage, completely alone. Just Doos, an acoustic guitar and a sliding steel.

  Part of Alistair Doos’ popularity, without a doubt, was the sheer mystery surrounding his life. There were two or three really great books about Doos, one written by a man named Jack Napier, Nathan’s colleague back in New York,
but all of them were spun from the stories of relatives and acquaintances. Doos had never allowed an interview in his life. At the time when Doos would have granted an interview, nobody was asking and now, he simply wouldn’t talk to people. Nathan thought it probably wasn’t so much a Salingeresque retreat from fame as it was a simple, Bartlebylike, “I prefer not to.” Nathan also gleaned from his readings that it was impossible for Doos not to be very wary of the human race.

  Doos was born into the most abject poverty in Mississippi in a shack close to the river in a place that didn’t have a name. His father ran out on the family that included Doos, his mother, three brothers and five sisters. Mrs. Doos dragged the family north to Ohio where she’d heard people were a little friendlier to black folk. She had heard wrong. The Doos family lost two children to murder and three of the five sisters were raped before they turned eighteen. Mrs. Doos died young, presumably killed by stress, and the children went their separate ways. But Alistair stayed in Sawmill because of a woman ten years his elder. The woman’s name was Rosita Johnson.

  Rosita was able to make some cash as a laundress and her job was enough to support Doos in his drinking and music endeavors. According to the folks in the town, they had never seen two happier people. When Alistair wasn’t playing his music, they were running around the town, drinking and making friends. And whenever Rosita could get the time off, she and Alistair traveled, Doos playing in whatever clubs would have him. There were rumors of a contract and then the bottom dropped out for blues. Alistair and Rosita looked around and found an America that was now heavy into jazz.

  But this didn’t discourage Alistair, he was still able to make some cash playing locally and Rosita put in some extra hours at the laundry. Then the bottom dropped out for Alistair and the lovely Rosita.

  A crazed preacher from the town proper decided to turn Alistair and Rosita into a moral lesson. The preacher, William Kerch, said a lot of things about them that didn’t make any sense like—“The colored folks shouldn’t be given the power to run around this town acting the way they do.” But the thing he said that people listened to was, “It’s a sin for them two coloreds to be livin like they do.” By that he meant unmarried. So the Reverend Kerch assembled a lynch mob and went up to the house of Alistair Doos and Rosita Johnson. He fired one shot into each of them as they slept and had his goons haul them out and string them up by their necks from a tree. As the mob stole back into the night, Kerch whispered into the small space between their dangling bodies, “I hope you both rot in hell.”